Three years ago, push technology was creating a buzz so loud you couldn’t help but notice it. This was a time when the Internet was finally entering the mainstream and search engines, in most cases, only did searches and had little else to offer.
The mountains of unsorted material was overwhelming as people sought out news and information vital to their business. Along came Pointcast and its push technology, and everyone thought they had the answer to the problem of information overload.
Instead of you finding information, information would find you. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.
Push technology in its simplest form means users receive information that is sent according to a predetermined set of criteria, established by the user. The specified information downloads automatically after the initial user request, usually via a screensaver or toolbar.
At face value, it sounded great, but it didn’t necessarily work out. One pundit summed up most users’ feelings about push technology: “At worst, it is a change from spending too much time pulling information off the Internet to too much time looking through unwanted and questionable information rammed down our PCs’ throats.”
The technology took the original problem and turned it into a different one. Despite the massive media blitz about push, many of the companies involved only in push technology have gone out of business or been absorbed into other enterprises.
“Push has gone from the most popular buzzword of 1997 and late 1996 to something verboten,” says Ross Rubin of Jupiter Communications, an Internet research firm. Many people have decided that “the cure was worse than the illness, and that instead of solving the problem of information overload, push technology just makes it worse.”
The data retrieved was littered with irrelevant information and ads. Larger corporations were experiencing network congestion as hundreds or even thousands of employees tried to use the technology. Hard drives were filling up with information.
Push technology still exists, but mainly as part of a much larger lineup of services. Yahoo and MSNBC both offer forms of push technology, and various news sites offer highly customizable news feeds — many for a fee.
Push does have its merits. It is credited with popularizing getting news via the Internet, and the push of e-mail is still an important and timely means of delivering mass amounts of information.
Those that survive in the business — even push pioneer Pointcast has since merged with Ewallet to become Entrypoint — refer to themselves as broadcasters, data aggregators or information management companies.
Push isn’t dead by any means, and as improved tools emerge to better filter content by relevance, it may create a buzz once more. But one thing push vendors learned the first time around is, if user-defined content matters to someone, it REALLY matters, and no irrelevant information will be tolerated. Todd Shryock ([email protected]) is SBN’s special reports editor.
